SEFER HOKHMAT SHELOMOH (GLOSSES ON THE TALMUD), RABBI SOLOMON LURIA, KRAKOW: [ISAAC BEN AARON PROSTITZ?], 1582

The full first edition of an important work of Talmudic textual criticism.

Rabbi Solomon Luria (Maharshal; ca. 1510-1574) was a prominent talmudist, yeshiva head, and halakhic authority with a strong inclination toward independent, critical thinking. After serving rabbinates in Ostrog and Brest-Litovsk, he finally settled in Lublin, where he eventually founded his own yeshiva, raising many prominent pupils. Seeing the Talmud as the ultimate source of the halakhah and eschewing the work of later codifiers, Luria felt it absolutely necessary to establish the correct text of the Oral Law in order to arrive at accurate halakhic decisions. Because the text of the Talmud, Rashi, and Tosafot in the tractates printed by Daniel Bomberg in Venice was, in Maharshal’s view, riddled with errors, he glossed his personal copies of these treatises with marginal corrections and comments that were eventually collated and posthumously brought to press in the form of the present work. The work continues to be printed, in abridged form, in virtually all modern editions of the Talmud. The present copy of Sefer hokhmat shelomoh comes from the collections of the Warsaw printer Joshua Gerson Munk and of British Sephardic Chief Rabbi Moses Gaster (1856-1939).